Sunday Music – It’s All Over Now Baby Blue – The Bob Dylan Series (Part 7)

Posted on Sun 05/16/2010 by TonyfromOz

Today’s music video is ‘It’s All Over Now Baby Blue’, and this version is from Graham Bonnet.

This video was posted to You Tube by fritz51357

With this series of posts on Bob Dylan, I am using two time lines. The first timing sequence is of when Bob actually wrote the songs. The second is when the different artists singing these covers recorded their versions of Bob’s songs. This second time line sometimes departs by some years the first line of when Bob actually wrote and recorded his own originals of these songs.

Bob wrote this song, ‘It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue’, in January of 1965, and it was released on his fifth studio solo album ‘Bringing It All Back Home’, released in March of 1965. From this album was lifted Bob’s biggest cover hit to this stage, ‘Mr. Tambourine Man’, recorded by the Byrds, featured in last weeks post.

This song today was also covered close to the time Bob recorded it by a few other artists, mainly English bands, and one of those bands was Them, with Van Morrison singing out the front of that outfit. This cover by Them is up there among the best of those many Bob Dylan covers. In fact this version by Them is often classified as a cover rarity that ranks up there with the original by Dylan himself, with Van Morrison’s driving vocals virtually ensuring he had a very long and successful solo career, which started following this song, the last from Them as a band. Of note in this cover by Them is the very effective use of the Mellotron, a keyboard gradually starting to become popular with bands around that time.

The Byrds also covered the song in 1969, and others also had minor hits with their cover versions.

These are the more celebrated versions of this song.

One that is not so celebrated is this really good version sung here in the featured song today by Graham Bonnet. He was a minor English singer who appeared in a variety of bands, as well as having a relatively successful solo career. He recorded his version of this song much later than those earlier covers of this song, and released it on his eponymous album in 1977, an album which did very well in Australia, in fact becoming a certified Gold album at the time. This Dylan cover in fact charted very well, rising to Number Five in a long stay in the Charts. The following year, he even had a Number One in Australia with a Bee Gees song, ‘Warm Ride’, a song that was considered for, and then left out of their ‘Saturday Night Fever’ monster album during the Disco era.

Not long after this, Bonnet was asked to join Richie Blackmore’s Rainbow outfit to replace singer Ronnie James Dio. Blackmore was one of the original founding members of that legendary band Deep Purple. Bonnet’s time with Rainbow may only have been two years but he credits his time with this band as one of the major influences in his further future career.

This song, ‘Baby Blue’, was also covered by a variety of female singers, Joan Baez, Judy Collins, Joni Mitchell, and Marianne Faithful foremost among them.

In what has amounted to a huge list of songs Bob has sung, this one probably ranks as one of his best.

This is the link to the version by Them, notable for Van Morrison’s wonderful treatment of the vocals.

This is the link to the original from Bob, here being sung during his famed tour of the UK in 1965, and this is lifted from that wonderful Documentary about Bob Dylan, D.A. Pennebaker’s ‘Don’t Look Back’.

UPDATE.

On a sad note, it was announced overnight that rock legend Ronnie James Dio passed away. As mentioned in the post, Dio was a member of Richie Blackmore’s Rainbow band. When he left that band, replaced by Graham Bonnet, he moved into that other legendary band Black Sabbath, where he replaced the departing foundation member of that band, ‘Ozzy’ Osbourne.